Vetted Research Assistants in California

“Analytics professional with experience spanning HSBC and the University of Buffalo, combining banking risk/portfolio analytics with reproducible Python and SQL reporting workflows. Stands out for cleaning complex multi-source data, standardizing business metrics across dashboards, and delivering measurable impact including an 80% reduction in manual reporting and an estimated GBP 1.2M profit contribution from scorecard redevelopment.”

“Internship experience building production-oriented AI systems, including a real-time voice scam/spoof detector (RawNet + AASIST) hardened for noisy audio via aggressive augmentation and Zoom-based noise simulation, evaluated with EER on clean and wild datasets. Also built an LLM-driven UI automation agent using Playwright for apps like Linear/Notion with modular tool design, unit tests, and replayable scripted scenarios, and has AWS Step Functions experience orchestrating Lambda/Cognito workflows.”

Karan Variyambat

Screened

Mid-level Machine Learning Engineer/Researcher specializing in computer vision and multimodal AI

San Diego, CA3y exp

“Developed a production wildfire smoke detection system where smoke is visually subtle and easily confused with fog/clouds; addressed this with a hybrid CNN+LSTM+ViT model and multimodal weather features to reduce false positives. Experienced running scalable, reproducible ML pipelines on shared GPU infrastructure using Slurm and Kubernetes-style batch jobs with checkpointing, retries, and rigorous error analysis.”

“Built and stabilized an AI-assisted document processing workflow for Possible Finance that supported underwriting without automating final loan decisions. Stands out for combining practical LLM integration skills with strong guardrails, validation, and fallback design in a financial workflow, delivering roughly a 35% reduction in document processing time.”

Wei-Hsien Wang

Screened

Entry-level AI Engineer specializing in full-stack generative AI systems

San Jose, CA1y exp

“AI/full-stack product engineer who has shipped both user-facing and internal LLM products, from a photo-to-music recommendation app to an experimentation agent at Azazie. Stands out for combining modern app development with production-grade agent and GraphRAG systems, including a 500k+ email analysis platform and measurable impact like 3x experiment velocity, 75% setup-time reduction, and 65% faster task discovery.”

“UCLA RoMeLa research assistant (since Oct 2025) building an embedded control and sensor-data platform for multi-robot coordination in a simulated warehouse. Deep hands-on experience with ROS on NVIDIA Jetson under RTOS constraints, secure MQTT/TLS telemetry, and SLAM performance optimization (including ORB-SLAM3) validated in Gazebo and deployed via Docker/Kubernetes and CI/CD.”

Utkarsh Mittal

Screened

Intern Data Scientist specializing in computer vision and LLM agents

Sunnyvale, CA0y exp

“Software engineering candidate with hands-on experience building and shipping LLM agents: created a production AI enrichment/coding agent at Covalent Metrology using Apollo.io + OpenAI, and built a Mistral hackathon router that dynamically selects among models to reduce token cost while maintaining quality. Also developed a real-time financial margin analysis agent that emails actionable insights and iterated on reliability issues (e.g., fixing misrouted emails, improving news relevance filtering).”

Suloni Praveen

Screened

Entry-Level Software Engineer specializing in data engineering and ML systems

Los Angeles, CA0y exp

“Built an end-to-end Next.js/TypeScript LLM-based scientific PDF analyzer using local Ollama/Llama inference to prioritize privacy and cost, producing structured research artifacts (e.g., authors/methods/findings) with ~92% extraction accuracy. At Qualtrics, helped replace a batch pipeline with a real-time, low-latency ML inference service (Python/Go on Kubernetes) using Redis caching, Grafana-based observability, and graceful fallbacks to protect UX during failures.”

“Head of Robotics at Orbital Composites who built the full ROS-based software stack ("OrbOS") for multi-robot KUKA-arm 3D printing of carbon-fiber composite geometries. Deep in motion planning and real-time control—created a pipeline to turn underconstrained toolpaths into optimal joint trajectories at massive command scale, plus redundant safety gatekeeping and a 250Hz synchronized robot+extruder controller. Has operated in a technical-founder capacity for ~6 years and values an engineering culture of openness, honesty, accountability, and high ownership.”

Anishkumar Mahalingam Iyer

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in AI/ML infrastructure and applied machine learning

Palo Alto, CA2y exp

“Interned at Rivian where they built and deployed a production Whisper-based ASR + LLM real-time event labeling pipeline to help autonomous-vehicle engineers diagnose failures and route issues to triage teams. Also built a stateful multi-agent "Code Partner" developer assistant using LangGraph/LangChain (planner/router/coder/critique/tester) with evaluation, adversarial testing, and stakeholder-friendly communication practices.”

Krishna Kodur

Screened

Mid-level Robotics & AI Researcher specializing in human-robot interaction and reinforcement learning

Santa Clara, CA8y exp

“Robotics software engineer who built an end-to-end mobile manipulation platform (Franka Panda on a Clearpath Ridgeback) for a simulated-kitchen human-robot interaction study with natural speech commands, implemented in Python/ROS. Has hands-on experience integrating diverse sensors (RealSense, LiDAR, biosignals) with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face) and fine-tuning GPT-Neo, plus simulation (Gazebo) and modern deployment practices (Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD).”

Atyab Hakeem

Screened

Junior Data Scientist / ML Engineer specializing in GenAI and computer vision

San Francisco, CA2y exp

“Software engineer who built and deployed OddPulse, a multi-agent LLM-powered continuous financial auditing system aimed at reducing compliance penalties by catching issues before audit cycles. Experienced with TrueAI-based agent orchestration, Airflow on GCP batch workflows, and rigorous evaluation/benchmarking (hit rate/MRR, latency/TTFT, cost) alongside security controls for sensitive financial data.”

“Revamped a university academic calendar system into a Python-based calendar generation service, turning a weeks-long manual scheduling workflow into software that generates dozens of valid calendar combinations in under a minute. Also contributed to an Amazon search ML classifier by introducing precision/recall evaluation to better surface critical failure modes and improve prediction quality.”